The US election is symptomatic of a new, gloomier political reality facing those concerned with global efforts to avert climate catastrophe. Since the issue of climate change first gained widespread attention in the early 1990s, it has never been far from the centre of political debate in most Western countries. As the pace of warming has increased, and its impacts have become more visible, you might expect that it would retain that place or even gain in importance in the minds of politicians and the voting public. In the US this year, the opposite has happened.
Not even the multiple weather-related disasters the country endured during the presidential campaign could shift the dial. Hurricane Helene roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the southern Appalachian mountains in late September with devastating winds and catastrophic flooding. Entire towns were swept away, and more than 230 people were killed. Two weeks later another major hurricane hit Florida. It didn’t matter. The climate crisis didn’t rank as highly as it previously had in <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-the-2024-election/">polls of voters’ concerns</a>, and it was barely mentioned by Joe Biden, his replacement as Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris or Donald Trump during their campaigns.
The lack of discussion of or concern about climate change in this election wasn’t a sign that efforts to limit warming are going well. Quite the opposite. The decades of green rhetoric by politicians and the never-ending round of global climate summits have got us nowhere. Total global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and the rate of increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (which are the most accurate measures of lack of progress) is accelerating. 
Over time, the gulf between the rhetoric used by politicians hoping to establish their green credentials and the grim reality of a society still well and truly hooked on fossil fuels has become harder and harder to ignore. This is, no doubt, part of the explanation for the growing phenomenon of “climate apathy”. For many years now, every time an election comes around we’ve been told by supposedly progressive parties like the US Democrats and Labor in Australia that climate change is a major challenge demanding urgent action. Again and again, though, when these parties come to power they fail to do anything more than the bare minimum about it.
You might object, in the case of the Biden administration, that the green rhetoric was matched to a degree by action. To the extent that Harris sought to draw attention to climate policy at all during her campaign, it was to highlight Biden’s “trillion dollar” investment in clean energy. At the same time, though, she made clear her continuing enthusiasm for fossil fuels. She was proud, she said, that the administration had “increased domestic gas production to historic levels” and that during her time in office the US has carried out “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history”. On both counts, she had every right to brag: in the 2010s the US overtook countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and it hasn’t looked back since.
Taking climate change seriously demands finding ways to wind down the fossil fuel economy. With something like this, you can’t “have your cake and eat it too”. However much you might invest in clean energy (and it’s true the Biden administration invested a lot), if that investment is being directly counteracted by significant increases in the production and consumption of fossil fuels, then what’s the point? 
We’ve had years of “climate wars” and “climate elections”. This time it was different. This was, when it comes to the climate, a “what’s the point?” election. We shouldn’t be overly surprised. When—despite what the scientists have been saying for decades and despite their own green rhetoric—those in power continually send the message that it’s not only okay but commendable to continue to expand the fossil fuel economy, it’s only natural that some would start to question whether climate change is really worth worrying about.
Donald Trump, of course, was only too happy to capitalise on this sentiment. Unlike the Democrats, Trump has always been very open about his enthusiasm for fossil fuels and disdain for climate science. During his campaign <a href="https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1852547593873526930">he promised</a> to “terminate the green new scam, one of the great scams in history”, and scoffed at the prospect of sea level rises, saying “Who the hell cares?” and joking, in <a href="https://www.rev.com/transcripts/elon-musk-and-donald-trump-interview">an interview with Elon Musk</a>, that “you’ll have more oceanfront property”.
Trump sought to link the Democrats’ climate initiatives to the inflationary wave that hit the US and much of the rest of the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biden administration, he said in July in his <a href="https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/read-donald-trumps-full-rnc-speech-accepting-gop-nomination/3432055/">speech to the Republican National Convention</a>, has “spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary prices”. He promised to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the cost of energy for US consumers.
The Democrats had no real answer to this. Having established that they too were enthusiasts for the “drill, baby, drill” mentality, they could hardly turn around and denounce Trump for it. So, by and large, they remained silent. This strategy, predictably, didn’t work well. While Trump supporters were thinking “What’s the point of action on climate change?”, many potential Democrat supporters were thinking “What’s the point of voting?”. Millions of those who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home this time. The Democrats’ promise of a “Trump-lite” administration inspired few.
Last time he was in power, Trump implemented a range of policies favourable to the fossil fuel industry—including reversing or rolling back almost 100 environmental regulations related to things like carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars. He also withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, a (theoretically at least) legally binding international treaty committing countries that signed up to it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His second term in the White House is likely to bring more of the same.
“That things ‘just go on’ is the catastrophe”, Walter Benjamin once wrote. “It is not that which is approaching but that which is.” Another four years of Trump is no new catastrophe for the planet. The catastrophe was already here. The terrifying thing is that this election will reinforce the tendency for people in countries like the US and Australia to think “What’s the point in trying to do anything about it?”

James Plested

‘Drill, baby, drill’: Climate change ignored in the US election

Is the Democratic administration of Joe Biden pro-worker or anti-worker? Opinions differ. Take Bernie Sanders. The day after the 2024 election, the Vermont senator issued a statement denouncing Biden, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party for having “abandoned the working class”. The language was punchy, direct, withering and accurate. The Democratic leadership, Sanders wrote, has nothing to offer workers. The party, controlled by “big money interests”, does not understand workers’ “pain and political alienation”. As an inevitable consequence of this, workers of all races are abandoning it. 
But there are other currents of opinion about the Harris-Biden Democrats. For example, that Joe Biden is “the most pro-working-class president in modern American history”, with an agenda that speaks “to the needs of the working class”. He is “the most effective president in modern history”, “a good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment”, who “wants to tax the rich so that we can fund the needs of working families”. These were the words of, um, Bernie Sanders, a few months ago. 
It was easy to lose track of Sanders over the last few years. He has not been worth paying much attention to. But over the last decade, Sanders has gone from being the scourge of the Democratic establishment to one of its most reliable surrogates.
In 2016 and 2020, he stood against establishment Democratic candidates, achieved widespread support, was buried by the Democratic apparatus and then rolled over to campaign for the people who crushed him. Each time he ran, the process embedded him more deeply into the party machine. In 2024, he didn’t even challenge Biden or Harris. His email list has become a Democratic Party fundraising tool—reliant on worn-out catchphrases and in-jokes from his past presidential runs that are only marginally less groan-worthy than the coconut-pilled bratmongering of the official Harris campaign.
Sanders once used hard-hitting, pro-worker language to attack the record of the mainstream Democrats. But throughout 2024, he used the same rhetoric to demand loyalty and obedience to the leader —whoever that leader might be.
When even the corporate liberal press could see that Joe Biden had to step aside, Sanders and his protégés in Congress became the president’s most aggressive and reliable bodyguards. It was a head-spinning role reversal. Establishment mouthpieces like the Washington Post and the New York Times were stating an obvious truth: Biden was past it and would have to drop plans to run for a second term. 
Sanders devoted himself to a transparently dishonest campaign to defend and promote Biden as a champion of the workers. In a major Times op-ed, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/opinion/joe-biden-president.html">extolled</a>
Biden’s allegedly pro-worker record and demanded that Democrats “stop the bickering and nit-picking”. A couple of weeks later, Biden threw in the towel. Sanders, the loyal mouthpiece of the Biden leadership, was left holding the bag.
I don’t care who leads the Democrats. But the incident proved that Sanders was now officially part of the dishonest, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/13/biden-sanders-aoc-liberal-lifeline/">deal-making Democratic machine</a>. Even most right-wing Democrats weren’t as willing as Sanders to burn their reputation in defence of a collapsing Biden candidacy. 
It didn’t stop there—and it wasn’t only Sanders. When Kamala Harris took over the reins, Sanders carried on his role as a key public advocate for a genocide-enabling neoliberal (and former prosecutor). His extra-special <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf5MThSniiY">Palestine-themed video manifesto</a>, in which he demanded that Palestine supporters swallow their pride and fall in behind the vice president, was a low point. “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/4868310-bernie-sanders-liz-dick-cheney-kamala-harris/">I applaud the Cheneys</a> for their courage in defending democracy”: that was another.
His surrogates and allies, now an entrenched Democratic faction, joined in—and went further. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Democratic National Convention to praise “leaders like Kamala and Tim [Walz]”. Her speech could have come from the mouth of any careerist Democrat of the Bill Clinton generation. 
Sanders at least acknowledged he disagreed with Harris on Gaza. Nothing like that from AOC. She assured the audience of party officials and donors: “[Harris] is working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza and bringing hostages home”. (No Palestinians were permitted to speak at the event.) The rest of the campaign brought further embarrassments. American politics moves quickly. AOC is now irrevocably cringe. To paraphrase George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future of the Democratic Party, imagine <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAnKayYSStM">AOC livestreaming Madden with Tim Walz—forever</a>.
As Donald Trump’s election proves, dishonesty is not a decisive disadvantage in capitalist politics. Leftists with functioning memories might roll their eyes to see Sanders suddenly remember that the Democrats are actually quite bad. But many will be grateful to hear someone stating obvious truths and calling for pro-worker politics. Still, there are some lessons to be drawn from Sanders’ brat summer.
First: how quickly, and comprehensively, political “harm minimisation” turns into loyal advocacy. Maybe Sanders thought he’d extracted some concessions from Harris and Biden. Maybe he really believes that Trump is a fascist danger who must be stopped at all costs—fair enough. Either way, Sanders seems to think that a Democrat in power is a necessary condition for social progress. So any doubters must be convinced—even if they’re doubting for good reasons. By this mechanism, “pragmatic” leftists become delusional Biden loyalists. People like Sanders, with authority on the left, devote themselves to justifying—and lying about—the allegedly pro-worker and anti-genocide outlooks of people like Biden and Harris.
But a Democrat in office isn’t necessary for social progress. Yes, America needs a form of politics that is pro-worker, anti-racist and not beholden to the oligarchy. But just as much, it needs a form of politics that operates outside elections—and that can function no matter who’s in the White House, the Supreme Court and the Congress. It needs a pro-worker politics that draws its power from strikes and social movements, not fundraisers and TV advertising. That form of politics isn’t going to come from the Democrats.
If an alternative isn’t constructed, most of the people issuing these broad-left denunciations of the Democrats—no matter how strident and accurate—are going to end up back as captives of a future Harris or Biden equivalent.

D. Taylor

Bernie’s brat summer

Preliminary analysis by the Wall Street Journal points to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/voter-turnout-election-2024-927a102c">a stunning drop in turnout among Democratic voters</a> in the United States on 5 November. 
The Republicans swept the elections for president, Senate and possibly the House of Representatives (counting continues in several districts). The precise reasons for their victories will become clearer in coming months as the results are dissected and more data comes to light.
But one statistic, highlighted by staff writers John West and Kara Dapena, already appears to be among the most significant: voter turnout declined by around 6 percentage points in counties won easily by President Joe Biden in the 2020 elections. By contrast, in counties won by then-President Trump by more than 10 percentage points, voters turned out at higher rates this year—despite overall voter turnout being down across the country.
To put it a little simplistically: Trump motivated Republicans more than Harris motivated Democrats. 
For example, in counties with the highest share of Black residents, college residents, Hispanic residents or union members, voter turnout dropped by more than the national average. In particular, voter turnout was down by an estimated 4.7 percent in counties with the lowest median income, and by nearly 4 percent in counties with the highest share of Black voters.
In working-class Detroit, behind Memphis the second-largest majority Black city in the US, the city clerk only a week before the election <a href="https://www.bridgedetroit.com/detroit-clerk-predicts-turnout-for-presidential-race-could-be-highest-in-a-decade/">predicted a record turnout</a>. In the end, Democrats overestimated Kamala Harris’s pulling power in <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/talking-gaza-in-detroit">the devastated city</a>, turnout being reported as 47 percent of eligible voters, compared to the Michigan statewide turnout of more than 73 percent, which was a record high.
“People don’t feel like they’re put back together coming out of the pandemic”, Branden Snyder, director of Michigan Election Defense Coalition, told Malachi Barrett from local news outlet BridgeDetroit. “[Harris’s] policy platform was more robust than Trump’s; he wasn’t offering any specifics. People were looking to hear what can government do, what can she do. That was a miss. There wasn’t enough conversation about the rising cost of rent, student tuition, good jobs.”
This sort of anecdotal feedback is common in media reports across the country. It confirms election day surveys, and polling for months in advance, showing that the economy was a decisive issue. 
Yet Democrats spent a great deal of energy trying to win over affluent Republicans—the so-called never-Trumpers—who are much closer ideologically to the elites who control the Democratic Party apparatus: wealthy donors and politicians in bed with the national security apparatus. 
There will be other stories to tell from this election, such as what now seems a clear and consolidated shift among Hispanic voters to the Republican Party, and the further fraying of working-class support for the Democrats.
But nothing thus far tells the story quite like Harris underperforming Biden by millions of votes.

The Democratic voters who stayed home

With the second election of Donald Trump, the US far right has cemented itself at the apex of world power. That the repugnant billionaire’s ascension to the White House is a defeat for US workers and progressive forces everywhere is nowhere more evident than in the spectacle of the anti-working-class scum celebrating his political resurrection. 
From Gina Rinehart and Andrew Bolt to Nigel Farage and Elon Musk—around the world, a who’s who of the “let them eat cake” set are beside themselves with glee that tens of millions of Americans venerate a wealthy and powerful con artist because he makes outlandish promises of national revival. 
Trump’s victory, they believe, has given them a renewed license for open and public bigotry. They can even say that bigotry and fabrication make for a winning political strategy, which is the only thing that seems to matter in capitalist politics. Their voices will now be amplified: it should be mandatory for any conservative party worth its salt to run like Trump. No more wet Liberals, just hard men and women who aren’t afraid to punch down. 
Anyone displaying the remotest sensitivity to the oppression or exploitation of their fellow human beings can now be publicly mocked, derided, beaten down—and labelled a communist of course—just as the oppressed and exploited ought to be mocked and beaten down for their weaknesses. Welcome to the new world order.
As if to prove the point, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a moment’s break from overseeing the holocaust in Gaza to gush about the “huge victory” in America. Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán called it “a much needed victory for the world”.
Wall Street then predictably surged, the Dow industrials index registering its biggest gain in two years on 6 November as the wealthiest 1 percent salivated at the prospect of yet more tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations while women bleed out in hospital parking lots, having been denied lifesaving reproductive care. Maybe Joe Rogan will dedicate a podcast to how these pathetic bleeders ought to toughen up, while he and his buddies banter about how funny a wounded vagina is.
Trump’s victory cannot be written off as a fluke, like in 2016, when he miraculously walked the narrowest of paths through the Electoral College to defeat the second most unpopular presidential candidate in recent history, Hillary Clinton. This year’s race was high turnout—not as high as the last presidential election, but it is projected to be the second highest voter participation rate since 1908. Compared to the results in 2020, Trump gained in many demographics, according to the exit polls, and in almost every geographic area, according to county returns.
He gained among Latinos and in the suburbs, among majority-white counties and majority-minority counties, among the old and among the young. He even gained in the big cities—fortresses of the Democratic vote such as New York City cracked or, in the case of Miami-Dade in Florida, crumbled. In fact, Trump won the popular vote, something considered almost impossible even for “moderate” Republicans in this age. And he won it despite a majority of the electorate openly admitting that they view him unfavourably. 
The Republicans gained control of the Senate. Potentially, they will win the House as well. If so, far-right reactionaries will control all branches of the US government—executive, legislative and judicial—from January next year. 
What of the Democratic Party? No one should shed a tear for that odious billionaire-driven killing machine. Kamala Harris ran the most right-wing Democratic campaign in recent history, first trading on fears of a Trump presidency to mobilise core party constituencies, then strutting her bonafides as a prosecutor, before pivoting to a love fest with the Cheney family in an effort to win over conservatives. 
Like Hillary Clinton, she failed. But like a terrorist bludgeoned by Bruce Willis at Dulles International Airport, she failed harder. 
“We’re not going back”, the vice president said repeatedly on the campaign trail. Well, the US is going backwards. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-is-the-us-election-so-close">As Lance Selfa explained recently</a>, that’s in no small part because of how the Democrats have governed in successive administrations: presiding over the economic ruin of communities and shifting politics to the right by constructing the worst sort of dog-eat-dog society at the behest of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce. 
Moreover, in this election, while Harris was parading her war criminal friend Dick Cheney’s endorsement and stumping over tea with his warmonger daughter in affluent suburbs, much of the electorate was pleading for economic relief. If you believe in fairy tales, then all the workers received magic puddings from the Democrats. In the real world, they were left drowning in debt and struggling to buy food while hundreds of billions continued to be siphoned to the military industrial complex and Liz Cheney’s friends.
If there was any positive news on Tuesday, it came with reports that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was challenging Harris in Dearborn, Michigan, where more than 50 percent of the population is of Middle Eastern descent and aghast that their own tax dollars are being used by the Biden-Harris administration to slaughter their friends and relatives in Palestine and Lebanon. Stein reportedly ended with 18 percent of the vote to Harris’s 36 percent, which was down from Joe Biden’s 69 percent—a stinging rebuke for her support for the genocide in Gaza. 
Small consolations aside, there was always going to be a fight after this election, regardless of the winner. While Trumpism might appear a uniquely American phenomenon, it is a symptom of a world in decay­. A tiny number of people living gated from the rest of the population have accrued obscene amounts of wealth while so many live in squalor and struggle. The parasites at the top, like Trump, deliver imperialist wars and increasing military budgets, environmental crisis and global warming, working- and middle-class debt bondage, health crises afflicting billions, migration crises, divide-and-rule politics, and far-right parties that have become normalised on every continent. The entire globe is a shitstorm.
There’s probably no country in which Trump’s victory will have a greater effect on political sensibilities than Australia. Not because this continent is primed for Trumpism, but because no other political class has such reflexively derivative political impulses. The political right here has no ideas of its own, even going so far as introducing the war on “woke” despite the word never having been part of the left’s lexicon. Exhibit A is the Herald Sun’s Bolt, who says that Harris’s defeat “is also a defeat of the horrendous woke army that’s run riot in the West for years” and that “Trump will now be the enemy of the woke”. 
“Woke army that’s run riot” is a euphemism for people having more progressive and accepting social attitudes, being more sensitive to the oppression of Indigenous people, being open to ideas about social solidarity and opposing imperialism and genocide. That’s what Trump and his acolytes globally want to wage war on: decency and working-class solidarity.
So it is utterly sickening, though unsurprising, to watch Labor politicians fall over themselves to congratulate the president elect. At the end of the day, they are all part of the same club. From Washington to Canberra, London to Beijing, competing cabals of rapacious ruling class thugs who ultimately share the same sensibilities: wealth and power for a few, work and drudgery for the rest.
That’s why this wasn’t just an American election, and it won’t be simply an American fight. It’s a worldwide contest for the soul of the societies in which we all will live.

Editors

Return of the beast

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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No matter who wins the presidential election, a central fact of US politics is that there is an unmovable conservative bloc of about 46 percent of the electorate. It’s Trump’s floor of support, and it’s the reason so many people ask themselves how, after everything Trump has revealed about himself, the race can be as close as it appears.
There are many explanations. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn reviewed many of them <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/02/upshot/democrats-trump-election.html">here</a>. Cohn argues that the “national political environment just isn’t as conducive to a Democratic victory as many might imagine”. He hangs that judgment on several factors: the unpopularity of President Biden, opinion polls showing that large majorities feel that the country is “on the wrong track”, and the pattern of backlash against ruling parties in the post-covid world of disruption and inflation.
These factors may explain why Trump has a consistent support of 46 percent in the current polling averages (46.9 in <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/538">ABC’s 538 average</a>). But they don’t explain why he received 46.8 percent of the popular vote in 2020 or 46.1 percent of the national popular vote in 2016. In other words, a solid conservative bloc in the electorate is willing to support Trump no matter what. And it has persisted for quite a long time. Even in the 2008 election—held during an historic meltdown in the economy that should have reduced the incumbent Republicans to non-existence—Republican John McCain received 45.7 percent of the vote, against Democrat Barack Obama’s “landslide” of 52.9 percent.
Despite the media’s obsessions with Trump’s alleged working-class base, it’s clear that most people who voted for him in 2016 were the same people—or at least the same types of people—who voted for stuffed-shirt capitalist Mitt Romney in 2012 or for faux cowboy George W. Bush, the scion the quintessential Republican establishment family, in 2000 and 2004.
For more than a generation, the Republicans have depended on solid support from 20 states in the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West. Various GOP (Grand Old Party) interest groups and voters have been held together by the Republican trinity of tax-cutting economic policies, a bloated Pentagon and security state, and conservative positions on social issues such as opposition to abortion.
The Republicans built a mass base for these politics using what’s been called a “dog-whistle” approach to racism—they avoided openly racist rhetoric, but the intended recipients got the message from racially tinged rhetoric on issues like “drugs” and “welfare”. Although on the losing end of the biggest presidential landslide in US history, Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign road-tested that approach. Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an infringement on private property rights.
While the electorate overwhelming rejected Goldwater, conservatives found that they excited passions not when they talked about property rights, but when they focused on so-called “cultural” issues that appealed to sections of the population—particularly to white Southerners moving away from the Democratic Party as the civil rights movement challenged the old order.
Later, Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, explained the strategy: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”.
These social factors made it possible for right-wing pro-business politicians and activists to pose as “populist” opponents of “big government” and “the liberal elite”, rather than being viewed more correctly as water carriers for big business. Right-wing leaders were very conscious of this. As right-wing pugilist Pat Buchanan wrote in 1977: “If there is any political future for us, it is forfeit, so long as we let ourselves be perceived as the obedient foot soldiers of the Fortune 500”.
Today, the Christian right is viewed primarily as the vehicle by which conservatives built opposition to women’s rights and gay rights. But one of the foundational events in the formation of the Christian right in the 1970s, which was led by one-time segregationist ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, was a fight with the IRS to preserve tax-exempt status for Christian schools, the majority of which were formed as “white academies” in the wake of school desegregation decisions.
The conservative political positions that the Republicans promote regularly garner support from a minority of the US electorate. The average GOP voter is a middle-aged, affluent white person, more likely to be a man than a woman, in a country that is increasingly less affluent, less white, and less religious, and in which women make up most of the population and electorate.
That’s a central reason the Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight national presidential elections while scoring big political gains during low-turnout “midterm” elections between the presidential votes every four years.
The Republicans rely on mobilising a shrinking “base”, which has led their key political operatives to turn every election into a death match against nefarious forces who are “taking away” the idealised 1950s version of the US that conservatives embrace.
This is the dirty secret about the Republican base that the 2007-08 Great Recession uncovered. Not only did economic devastation push at least a section of the conservative middle class to embrace more far-right politics, but free-market economics has delivered less and less to them. So, to keep them hitched to the GOP coalition, the Republicans amped up their “culture war” and turned it not simply against liberal policies like abortion rights, but into a defence of what the liberal historian Allan Lichtman called a “white Protestant nation”.
Despite media speculation to the contrary, <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support">Trump’s base is not the “white working class”</a>. It is a new incarnation of the 2010 Tea Party—specifically, <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/tea-party-donald-trump-ted-cruz/">in the words of Kate Aronoff, writing in Jacobin</a>, voters that the Tea Party movement activated who “are partial to candidates that buck the establishment, and thus extremely receptive to the billionaire’s appeals”.
Research has shown that these conservatives are less concerned with free-market nostrums, and more “worried about sociocultural changes in the United States, angry and fearful about immigration, freaked out by the presence in the White House of a black liberal with a Muslim middle name, and fiercely opposed to what they view as out of control ‘welfare spending’ on the poor, minorities, and young people” in the words of <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/jane-mayer-dark-money-review-koch-brothers-gop">political sociologist Theda Skocpol</a>.
Undercurrents of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and socially conservative politics have long coincided with the economic conservatism supported by the more upscale voters among the Republican base. But the 2008 financial crisis discredited the kind of elite-friendly, neoliberal politics that the Republican establishment promoted, and shifted a section of the middle-class Republican base in a more extreme direction.
Of course, the irony here is that Trump—the supposed “populist” <a href="https://socialistworker.org/2018/01/04/the-phony-populist-delivers-for-the-rich">standing up for the “forgotten American”</a>—delivered as much, and probably more, for big business and the rich than any establishment Republican could have. Trump’s con game is so transparent—and, to date, so successful—that the rest of the party is following suit.
But it isn’t just the dynamics of US politics that will preserve Trumpian “populism” as a viable right-wing politics in the Republican Party. Trumpism is part of a worldwide phenomenon that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
In country after country, the recession produced a political polarisation that has firmly established the more extreme right. Longtime governing parties, from mainstream conservatives to social democrats, embraced neoliberal austerity, while right-wing “populist” parties like the National Rally in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, blaming immigrants and Muslims for deteriorating living standards, presented themselves as opponents of a corrupt status quo.
<a href="https://isreview.org/issue/104/choosing-or-refusing-take-sides-era-right-wing-populism">As the late Marxist historian Neil Davidson wrote</a>, these forces filled a vacuum created when the two major political blocs in capitalist politics—the traditional right and the social democratic or liberal “left”—converged around neoliberal economic policies. With substantive differences over economic policy taken off the table, differentiation between the two blocs often came down to differences on “cultural” issues like religion, race and immigration.
The Great Recession shattered whatever popular appeal neoliberal economics had, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/populism-european-politics-right-left-bavaria">breaking up the stable bipartisan regimes</a> that dominated most rich countries. As Davidson put it:
“The revival of the far right as a serious electoral force is based on the apparent solutions it offers to what are now two successive waves of crisis, which have left the working class in the West increasingly fragmented and disorganised, and susceptible to appeals to blood and nation as the only viable form of collectivism still available, particularly in a context where the systemic alternative to capitalism—however false it was—had apparently collapsed in 1989-91.
“The political implications are ominous. The increasing interchangeability of political parties gives the far right an opening to appeal to voters by positioning themselves as outside the consensus in ways that speak to their justifiable feelings of rage.”
In many countries, one part of the broader conservative side of the spectrum sliced off in an anti-immigrant or “populist” direction, with the mainstream right accommodating itself to that. For example, in the wake of a huge economic collapse in Brazil in the late 2010s, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won over sectors of the traditional right, like agribusiness, and a radicalised middle class that used to form the base of the mainstream neoliberal party of <a href="https://www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article14236">former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso</a>.
In the US, the same global forces are at work, but the US’s national particularities remain. Despite the seriousness of the 2007-08 recession, the US did not plunge to near-depression levels like Greece or Spain—or Brazil. So, the echo of the far right was fainter in the US, and it found a hearing in and around the main conservative party, the Republicans. So far, the polarisation that, in the Spanish state, cracked the previously bipartisan regime into, initially, at least four main parties, has mostly remained within the confines of the two main parties in the US.
The Trumpification of the GOP has proceeded apace since Trump first emerged on the scene. Indeed, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/donald-trump-lumpen-capitalist-class-electio">as socialist Sam Farber warned</a>: “The alliance of religious conservatism and white nationalism that Trump built may turn out to be more solid and enduring than the Republican neoliberal-religious alliance that preceded it”. That has remade the GOP into more of an “illiberal” anti-democratic party like Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary. It has also given license to the organisation of far-right forces like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—the street fighters in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot that tried to install Trump as president after he lost the 2020 election to Biden—under the broader Trumpist umbrella.
The story so far has been about how the modern GOP built itself as part of the conservative backlash against the gains of the 1960s civil rights, women’s and LGBTQ movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But the GOP would not have gotten as far if the other part of the capitalist party duopoly, the Democrats, didn’t help—or at least not impede—it. Since 1992, the first post-Cold War election, Democrats have held the White House for 20 of 32 years. In that time, they became, in some ways, the most zealous advocates of market reforms, free trade and global military deployment for “humanitarian intervention”.
As Bill Clinton’s administration presided over an economic expansion in the 1990s, his party itself transformed, in the words of political analyst Kevin Phillips, “into a party of the wealthy cultural and technological elite, indeed one whose fortunes and supporting middle-class numbers in the North matched those of the GOP”. The Clinton administration pushed through conservative policies—such as ending welfare payments as a right and balancing the federal budget—that Republicans never could have implemented. Former Federal Reserve chair, the conservative Alan Greenspan, quipped that Clinton was the “best Republican president we’ve had in a while”.
Abetting the shift to the right in the Democratic Party was the atrophy and decay of the popular constituencies that comprised the party’s New Deal and Great Society coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s. Organised labour’s continual decline (today representing about 10 percent of US workers from twice that in the 1980s) has left it without significant influence on the Democratic agenda. The same decay in vision and mobilising power among labour unions also took hold of civil rights and women’s rights organisations. Increasingly, these organisations became little more than lobbying groups whose independent political stances became indistinguishable from those of Democratic politicians.
“For far too many decades, the mainstream pro-choice movement has relied on Democrats to protect the right to legal abortion, even as Democratic Party politicians from both the White House and Congress have consistently failed to fulfill their pro-choice campaign promises”, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/abortion-rights-turning-back-the-clock-way-way-back/">wrote Sharon Smith in 2022</a>. “The consequence is that abortion rights have been so eroded over the last decades—with restrictive waiting periods, parental notification and consent laws, laws criminalising transporting a patient to another state to procure an abortion, and the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding for poor women’s abortions, reinstated each year by Congress since 1976—that there was little left to salvage.”
The current reality, after the Trump-packed right-wing Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, is a hellscape in much of the country. But the Democrats now see that abortion is overwhelmingly popular. Most activists knew that for decades, while Democratic politicians accommodated the right by insisting that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare”. 
By running away from defending abortion, Democrats amplified anti-abortion messaging. Today, they are doing the same with their insistence, for purely electoral calculations, that they are “tougher on the border” than Trump. And they wonder why public opinion has shifted against the benefits of immigration to the US.
The hope that a Democratic victory in 2024 will defeat Trumpism is in vain. Trump may end up in prison, but the forces he helped to concentrate will remain. Without a mass upsurge in working-class or social struggle that alters the political balance of forces in the US, the same pressures will continue to batter the two-party system.
If the Democrats in power think that they can resume their normal, wonky bipartisan ways, they are in for a rude awakening. They might even face a more extreme right-wing opposition, whose leaders will be far more competent—and thus more dangerous—than Trump and his entourage.

Lance Selfa

Why is the US election so close?

The Liberal National Party decisively won the Queensland state election on the weekend, defeating Labor in many of its historic safe seats. 
Labor was hit hardest in the state’s north, losing key areas such as Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay. There were significant swings toward the LNP, largely fuelled by a “tough-on-crime” campaign. These losses are particularly striking; Labor had held Mackay for 99 years. While Labor retained many Brisbane seats, there were notable swings against it. 
The LNP victory is bad news for the Queensland working class. The centre of the conservatives’ campaign was a racially charged beat-up about youth crime—so expect the new government to unleash a range of punitive measures targeting Aboriginal youth. 
Labor has governed Queensland for 30 of the last 35 years. It has been defeated primarily because it failed to protect workers’ living standards, the number one concern for voters, according to polling. 
Over the last decade, wages increased by a quarter—but Brisbane house prices doubled, and unit prices rose 45 percent. Outside Brisbane, unit prices surged by 90 percent and houses by 60 percent. Once you factor in higher mortgage repayments, rent, bills, groceries, etc, there’s a lot for people to be bitter about. 
Facing an election wipeout, the Miles government rolled out last-minute cost-of-living policies, including free lunches for primary school children, 50 cent public transport fares, a new state electricity retailer and a 20 percent reduction in car registration fees. The measures likely saved Labor from what was expected to be a complete rout.
Another factor that helped Labor was the emergence of women’s rights as a campaign issue. 
Abortion access became a focal point after Katter’s Australia Party promised to overturn the 2018 decriminalisation of abortion if the LNP were to win. The LNP did not want this topic to dominate the election, given the high support for abortion rights among the public but the widespread pro-life sentiments of LNP members. 
Party leader David Crisafulli dodged media questions about the issue many times—primarily because LNP members have a clear history of opposing abortion rights. In 2018, all but three LNP members voted against Labor’s decriminalisation bill, Crisifulli included. 
The swing toward the LNP reflects discontent with Labor rather than general enthusiasm for the LNP’s platform. 
However, the party’s “tough-on-crime” policies did strike a nerve. Sixty percent of respondents to a Brisbane Times poll said crime was a “very important” issue.
The LNP’s central policy—“adult crime, adult time”—proposes giving youth offenders adult prison sentences. In campaign speeches, Crisafulli referred to a “generation of untouchables”, a euphemism for Indigenous youth, who pro-prison campaigners think are treated too lightly by the justice system.
The portrayal of a “youth crime crisis” is, in reality, a racist fabrication. Queensland’s Police Service data show an 18 percent decrease in unique youth offenders and a 6.7 percent drop in youth offences since 2021. 
And Queensland already leads the country in youth incarceration, Aboriginal children being disproportionately represented in detention facilities.
Why then did the LNP’s scare campaign resonate so much in north Queensland? 
Whenever Labor has faced pressure from the LNP on crime, they have historically capitulated. In the past three years, Labor has suspended the Human Rights Act twice, most recently to remove detention as a last resort for children. 
These concessions have legitimised the LNP’s rhetoric. Instead of diffusing right-wing pressure, Labor has amplified it, allowing the LNP to propose new measures like “reset camps” for young people.
The Queensland Greens were confident they could retain their two inner-city seats and potentially win more. But, while their statewide vote was stable, they lost ground in their target seats. 
They lost South Brisbane and are on a knife edge in Maiwar in the inner west.
The LNP’s decision to preference the ALP over the Greens in South Brisbane, reversing its 2020 strategy, likely contributed to this outcome. But the Greens’ primary vote also fell across inner-city areas because the ALP’s policies, such as low public transport fares and free school lunches, attracted more left-wing voters.
The incoming government has made its priorities clear. The first order of business is introducing punitive measures that would increase the Aboriginal prison population. 
Crisafulli has promised “no employment cuts” in the public service, distancing himself from the mass sackings that destroyed the popularity of the last LNP government. However, as he aims to reduce state debt while expanding youth detention, public service job cuts could still eventuate.
The right to abortion also looms large. The LNP might want to avoid a confrontation immediately, but it could become unavoidable if Robbie Katter pushes the issue in parliament. 
We must be prepared to fight the new government’s right-wing agenda.
The unions must fight if the party goes on the offensive against workers.
We need to build a movement against racism.
And we need to build a movement to defend abortion rights. 
A rally calling for the protection of abortion rights is planned for 6 pm this Friday, 1 November, in Brisbane Square. Within 24 hours of the election results, the rally details garnered more than 1,000 shares on Instagram.
Abortion rights could serve as a rallying point against the LNP’s broader agenda. It’s encouraging that resistance will greet the LNP’s first week in office.

Tierna Parker

Labor loses Queensland, fight against LNP begins

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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With a little over a week until election day, the polls show the closest race in a long time. The final New York Times poll had the race tied 48-48, and the most recent poll for CNN showed a 47-47 race. In the polling aggregator 538, Harris led Trump by <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/">1.4 percentage points on 26 October.</a> In the seven swing states that will determine the electoral college votes, surveys show the race to be tied or within a point or two for either candidate. Democrats believe that Harris leads in the bare minimum states she needs to win 270 electoral votes: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and a single congressional district in Nebraska.
Most people who aren’t Trump supporters continue to ask themselves how the race can be this close. After all, Trump was a terrible president who tried to overturn the last election. He is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a fraudster, a bigot, a racist. Dozens of people who worked in Trump’s administration have called him a menace and endorsed Harris. Trump’s one-time chief of staff, John Kelly, a conservative former general, has labelled Trump a “fascist” and reported conversations in which Trump signalled admiration for Adolf Hitler. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, may be more unpopular than Trump.
To understand how we find ourselves here, we need to take a step back and look at the national, international and historical backdrop to the 2024 election. There are conjunctural and structural reasons for Trump’s staying power. 
First, the conjunctural. By many accounts, the US economy has had the strongest recovery from the pandemic of all its peers. Yet it still suffered from an increase in prices unseen in 40 years. While the inflation rate has dropped closer to historic averages, prices are still much higher than they were pre-pandemic. This means that for most of Biden’s term, working people’s living standards declined. And the Biden administration ended COVID-era social supports. 
If we look across the world and elections over the last year or so, we can see that most COVID-era incumbent governments have lost to the opposition: Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and the Netherlands, to name a few. Polls currently predict a landslide loss for Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. So Trump benefits from a “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent feeling. 
From this viewpoint, the strength of the US economy and the unpopularity of MAGA (“make America great again”—Trump’s slogan) might be the only things keeping Harris in the race.
The “structural” point is that there is a large conservative bloc representing about 46-47 percent of the electorate that supports Trump no matter what. Half of these people are Christian religious conservatives. This is where most people who support conservative politics and are averse to social change and the like gather. Trump’s politics might be called “restorationist”, as in returning the US to the 1950s—or even to the idealised pre-COVID Trump years. 
A second structural feature that keeps Trump competitive is the electoral college, a constitutional relic of the 1700s designed to preserve the support of slave-holding southern states in the early US republic. The votes that elect the president are cast state by state, and are disproportionately allocated to conservative and rural states. 
Even though the Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans in seven of the last eight national presidential elections, the Republicans (including Trump in 2016) “won” the presidency twice while losing the popular vote. This is why the entire presidential campaign is focused on winning seven “swing” states, whose electorates are closely divided between the two parties. 
While Trump winning the popular vote is conceivable, most observers assume that Harris will win the national popular vote. But Trump could still end up as president by winning enough “swing state” votes to win the electoral college.
Does all this mean that Trump will win outright? There is no way to tell. But we can assume that unless (or even if) Harris wins decisively, Trump will declare victory and claim that the election was “stolen” from him. Trump and the Republicans <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/opinion/trump-election-crisis.html">have laid the groundwork for a series of challenges</a> to votes in states and to election certification, and other court challenges that might prompt the Trump-friendly Supreme Court to rule in his favour. 
In contrast to 2020, when Trump relied on a Star Wars-bar collection of lawyers to prosecute his case, and when key Republicans refused to go along with his “stolen election” lie, the GOP is more firmly on board with Trump’s strategy today. 
Moreover, as pro-Democratic Party legal expert Neil Katyal points out, for Trump to have succeeded in 2020, he would have had to reverse the electoral votes in several states. If the election is as close as it appears today, it could come down to the vote in one or two states. That would give Trump’s strategy a better chance of succeeding.
The Democrats aren’t without advantages. Harris has raised an astounding $1 billion in the last three months. Democratic ads dominate airwaves, and they have a huge advantage in the level of organisation, including paid staff and volunteers across the swing states. Democrats say they are more <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/649397/democrats-drive-surge-election-enthusiasm.aspx">“enthusiastic” to vote than Republicans report.</a> The Democrats’ most motivating issue, abortion rights, will be on ten states’ ballots, including swing states Arizona and Nevada. Those referendums could bring a more pro-Harris electorate to the ballot box. The key question is: Will all these factors overcome the conjunctural and structural factors that support Trump?
Harris’s campaign appears to be aggressive, with a media blitz, many rallies and ridicule of Trump. Trump’s appearances reveal his incoherence and malevolence. The Harris campaign also seems to think (and presumably they have data to back this up) that there is a non-trivial section of Republicans who will cross over for them. This is why the Harris campaign has emphasised support from Trump’s generals and has campaigned with the likes of former Republican representative Liz Cheney. 
<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/">By some estimates, Biden won almost one-in-five of the minu</a>scule number of self-described “liberal” or “moderate” Republicans in 2020. But overall, Biden won the support of only 5 percent of Republicans, compared to the 4 percent who voted for Clinton. Perhaps Harris will gain more Republican support than Biden did, but that’s hardly a mother lode of votes.
And what message does Harris’ courting of Republicans send to the Democratic Party’s core supporters? Harris and her team wouldn’t allow the symbolic concession of a Palestinian-American elected official to endorse her at the Democratic National Convention. And now she’s celebrating former Vice President Dick Cheney, who millions consider a war criminal for his role in engineering the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. If nothing else, Harris’s welcoming of anti-abortion, conservative Republicans into the Democratic “big tent” tells you what the Democratic Party really is: a centre-right party of the capitalist status quo.
With the election as close as it is, and it hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states, there could be a hundred reasons why one candidate wins and the other loses. The Arab Uncommitted movement said it <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/politics/uncommitted-movement-kamala-harris-trump/index.html">couldn’t endorse Harris, but it didn’t want Trump to win</a>. That can be interpreted as an indulgence to say that people who voted Uncommitted against Biden can still vote for Harris. But if they don’t or they vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or sit out the election, or skip the presidential line on their ballots, could that cost Harris Michigan? If so, the Democrats would have only themselves to blame.
No matter how the election turns out, its political meaning will be contested. If Harris wins, her supporters will take it as validation of the outreach to Republicans and inoculating themselves by endorsing the military and a “tough on the border” immigration policy. If Harris loses, no doubt Democratic “centrists” will say that didn’t <a href="https://thedemocraticstrategist.org/2024/08/teixeira-democrats-are-super-happy-working-class-voters-are-not/">move far enough to the right</a>. And social democratic progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will most likely say she wasn’t left wing enough. 
Right now, both sides are holding their fire and giving cover to Harris. If Harris loses, most of her supporters will despair of the country’s condition and wonder if they have completely lost touch with it.
The Democratic side feels <a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/closing-strong-with-nv-senator-cortez">optimistic about what they are seeing “on the ground”</a>. So far, the early vote and new registrations seem to be trending to them. Their side will oversee the election machinery at the state level in most of the swing states. It’s still too early to tell how the election will swing with only a few days left.
If nothing else, the current state of the election should point out the absurdity of the system, its complete domination by the rich and the fact that neither candidate is addressing the underlying issues facing humanity today: global warming, economic precariousness and a migration crisis.

The final stretch of the US election

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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To liberal pundits and Democratic Party-aligned commentators, Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech in Douglas, Arizona, following a trip to the southern border in late September, was a brilliant piece of political jujitsu. 
“The Vice President visited the US-Mexico border yesterday and gave a forceful speech about the border and immigration. I know many of you have weighed in how important you think it is that the VP lean into these issues, and she sure did last night”, long-time Democrat Simon Rosenberg wrote to the readers of his newsletter <a href="https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/vp-harris-goes-on-offense-on-the">Hopium Chronicles</a>. 
“Voters want to hear about solutions on the border—all voters, white voters, Latino voters, Black voters”, Democratic-aligned pollster Matt A. Barreto, who specialises in polling Latinos, told the New York Times. “Voters want to hear, What are elected officials going to actually do to address the broken immigration system? And there was very high support for the bipartisan border security bill.”
One group of people who are most likely not cheering the Democrats’ “pragmatism” on immigration are Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, and other towns across the US. These people have been the target of a campaign of calumny verging on “blood libel”, which the Trump/Vance campaign has orchestrated.
The outlandish internet lies that Haitian migrants in Springfield were capturing and eating pets <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-jd-vance-and-a-virulent-neo-nazi-group-inflamed-tensions-over-migrants-in-springfield">emanated from neo-Nazi</a> political agitation. The Republican candidates for president and vice president deliberately elevated them to the centre of the political debate. Trump has since worked this vile racist nativism into each of his rally speeches, merely changing the group of migrants he attacks according to the location of the rally. 
As the election season careens into its last month, Trump is amping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric. As Natalie Andrews and Michelle Hackman note in the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-amps-up-rhetoric-to-keep-immigration-at-center-of-election-37ce53da">Wall Street Journal</a>: 
“The Republican presidential nominee and former president has long held sealing the southern border as his signature issue, but he is now drawing a direct line from immigration to more of society’s ills than ever, casting himself as the only one who can fix it. Trump and Vance, his running mate and the junior senator from Ohio, have alleged migrants are to blame for unaffordable home prices, high unemployment, infectious diseases, rising car insurance, unsafe elections and, perhaps most infamously, missing house pets.”
Trump’s strategy is clear, but so is Harris’. She is applying the Democrats’ tried-and-tested modus operandi: move to the “centre” (aka, the right) and assume that the liberal Democratic base and its organisations will follow along because “they have nowhere else to go”. 
The actions of the immigrant rights group United We Dream illustrate the cul-de-sac in which Democratic-aligned interest groups have found themselves. Last month, a coalition of 83 rights groups led by United We Dream <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y8GSbgtbCneEhbbxV1J55tkCUKSOO2TN/view">issued a letter pledging</a> to oppose the bipartisan “border security” bill that Harris has promised to revive. 
“It is shameful that instead of investing in welcoming the most vulnerable people who seek safety and a better life, and who make our country better by every measure, we’d suggest wasting our resources in ineffectual, inefficient deterrence policies that harm and kill these same people”, the letter read, in part.
Yet only days after issuing the letter, United We Dream endorsed Harris for president, pledging to <a href="https://unitedwedreamaction.org/2024/09/united-we-dream-action-is-going-all-in-to-push-kamala-harris-to-deliver-for-our-generation/">“go all in” to elect her.</a> This perfectly illustrates the logic of lesser evilism, which is dominant in liberal circles. 
The Democrats think they’ve found a way to parry Republican accusations about them being “soft” on “border security”: embracing Republican policies as their own. They don’t say so, of course, but that is what they did when the Democratic-led Senate negotiated the bipartisan border bill that gave the political right almost everything it wanted. Praise for the bill was on full display at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Yet the Trump-enthralled GOP couldn’t take “yes” for an answer. And so, in February, when the House leadership announced it wouldn’t even consider the bill if it passed the Senate, the Republicans abandoned the effort before it came to a vote. This handed the Democrats a talking point that they have used since: Democrats want to “solve” the border “crisis”, while Republicans want “chaos”. In fact, the Democrats think so highly of the deal that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced that he wants to revive it now. The liberal Senator Chris Murphy <a href="https://www.murphy.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/murphy-announces-reintroduction-of-bipartisan-border-bill-my-hope-is-that-republicans-will-choose-this-country-over-donald-trumps-campaign">obliged Schumer and reintroduced the bill</a>.
It was fortunate that the GOP shot down the bill in February. It’s a <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/178845/border-deal-climate-denial-democrats">terrible bill</a> that supporters of a just immigration system should reject. It would have increased funding for the border security complex, including increasing capacity at detention centres and the number of deportation flights. It would have subjected asylum seekers to “security vetting” and included documentary requirements that most asylum seekers couldn’t fulfil. It would have given the Department of Homeland Security the authority to “close the border” to asylum seekers if 8,500 “inadmissible” migrants (i.e., people who failed the checks outlined above) arrived in a day. 
If implemented, the changes would increase the deportation rate. This is what the Democrats mean when they talk about “solving” the migrant crisis. The bill did not address the status of “dreamers”—migrants who came to the US as children—who have been protected from deportation and allowed to attend school and to work, but who lack a path to citizenship. Moreover, it left in limbo the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the US—the population that Trump and his acolytes promise to round up and deport should Trump enter the White House in 2025.
Harris has distinguished herself from Biden, and not in a positive way. In the September speech, she announced that any immigrant apprehended at places other than an officially recognised border crossing will be deported and prevented from immigrating to the US for five years.
It’s clear that the politics of immigration, which has always oscillated between the demands of US capitalism for labour <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/1924-us-immigration-act-history">and deep currents of white supremacy and xenophobia</a>, are shifting to the right in the current climate. Opposition to immigration and a “browner” US has been one of the—if not the main—motivating factors on the contemporary right since at least the Tea Party agitation in the early 2010s. Trump regularly injects Hitlerian rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation into his rambling rally speeches. 
Republicans have pushed the envelope on racist immigration policies—everything from the symbolic impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the anti-migrant policies emanating from right-wing governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott. Abbott, with the assistance of 25 other Republican state attorneys general, has led a challenge to the federal government’s authority to enforce immigration policy. In so doing, they are advancing a neo-Confederate viewpoint that the <a href="https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-texas-border-standoff-is-an-acute">US government is a “compact”</a> between sovereign states and that those states can opt out. 
Besides making migrants’ lives miserable in their states, Abbott and DeSantis have had much greater success in forcing their “red state” views into the political discourse of supposedly more immigrant-friendly “blue” states. Taking a page from civil-rights era southern segregationists, they have bused or flown more than 100,000 immigrants to cities such as Denver, New York and Chicago since 2021. 
Those cities’ responses—at times inadequate and other times <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-migrant-crisis-in-chicago-a-test-case/">bumbling</a>—have played into the hands of the right. Even in these urban centres where a large percentage of the Democratic Party base are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, the migrant crisis has touched off a <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/04/19/migrant-influx-black-residents-response/">zero-sum politics of resentment against migrants</a>. In that climate, only the right benefits.
The Biden/Harris administration has not only capitulated to this sentiment (by, for example, <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/biden-adds-to-trumps-border-wall/">continuing Trump’s wall boondoggle at the border</a>). Its policies have contributed to the zero-sum political environment. In a recent interview, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-haitian-immigrant-in-springfield-experiences-the-best-and-worst-of-america">Springfield, Ohio, Haitian community leader Viles Dorsainvil</a>
noted that agitation and hatred against Haitians increased after the Biden administration cut COVID-era social assistance programs in 2021-22. Winding down these programs was central to Biden’s claim that the administration “led us to the other side” of the pandemic.
For the first three months of 2024, the Gallup survey found <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/644570/immigration-named-top-problem-third-straight-month.aspx">immigration to be the top “problem”</a> Americans reported going into the presidential election. That certainly made Democrats take notice and accelerated their attempts to claim a “bipartisan” immigration deal. But a closer look at the polling trends shows that Republicans drive most of the national concern on immigration, with a more recent up-tick among independents. But this also emphasises how much the immigration issue dominates the Republican/conservative part of the electorate, while the majority has many other competing concerns.
In fact, even in polls that ostensibly show shocking levels of support for Trump policies like mass deportation, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/27/trump-and-harris-supporters-differ-on-mass-deportations-but-favor-border-security-high-skilled-immigration/">there remains widespread support</a> for a “pathway to citizenship” for immigrants, opposition to the deportation of undocumented people who have lived in the US for decades and support for “legal” immigration across the board. But liberal and Democrat capitulation to Trump—whether defended as <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/harris-trump-immigration-crime-analysis/">“savvy” or “safe” in this election year</a>—simply amplifies Trumpism. As the liberal New Republic writer <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/186487/kamala-harris-democrats-shameful-foolish-surrender-immigration">Felipe de la Hoz put it:</a> 
“So yes, if voters are on the one hand bombarded with a simplistic and all-encompassing vision of a country beset by the perils of masses of faceless immigrants and, on the other, hear crickets or a sort of tepid agreement with the promise that Democrats will actually be better at handling it, of course their opinions are going to trend in a restrictionist direction.”
Viewed from outside the realm of grubby electoral politics, the recent surges in migration are the product of decades of US imperialism and domestic political dysfunction across the Americas. Decades of neoliberal economic “reform” have helped to destroy whole sectors of the Central American economies. US-backed “drug wars” in Central America and Colombia have also contributed to flows of migrants fleeing paramilitaries. The US has meddled in <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/haitis-people-have-never-been-allowed-to-control-their-own-destiny/">Haitian affairs for centuries</a>. And US economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have made life unsustainable for millions in those countries. 
These are some of the forces pushing people to risk life and limb to seek asylum at the southern US border. They are willing to take their chances now via “unofficial channels” rather than spend decades trying to become US citizens through official pathways. That established immigrants are made to wait years to receive work permits also fuels anti-migrant sentiment against recent arrivals.
The paradox of all this is that while the US’s capitalist parties keep racing to the bottom, their paymasters in the US capitalist class need immigrants of all stripes to sustain their post-pandemic profits and growth. As the Marxist economist <a href="https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/us-economy-saved-by-immigrants/">Michael Roberts wrote</a>:
“The influx of immigrants to work and to study is helping the US economy—it’s keeping a high supply of labour available for employers particularly in the areas of heavy demand for labour: healthcare, retail and leisure, also sectors of relatively low pay.
“Net immigration is becoming vital to US capitalism. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the US labour force will have grown by 5.2 million people by 2033, thanks mainly to net immigration and the economy is projected to grow by $7 trillion more over the next decade than it would have without new influxes of immigrants.”
If capitalist “rationality” gives way to political pressure, it <a href="https://jacobin.com/2017/06/trump-cuba-obama-normalized-relations">won’t be the first time</a>. But in an environment where both major parties are competing to portray themselves as “tough on the border”, the only direction this debate will go is down ... into the sewer.

Democrats follow Trump into the sewer on immigration

Joe Allen is a former Teamster and the author of <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1441-the-package-king">The Package King: A Rank and File History of United Parcel Service</a>. In this article, he discusses the iconic Teamsters union, the largest transport union in the United States. The union’s image lately has been tarnished by President Sean O’Brien’s association with the far right. O’Brien’s courting of Donald Trump and his appearance at the Republican National Convention have provoked a backlash among rank-and-file union members and a debate about how the Teamsters should orient in the lead-up to the presidential election next month. 
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The Teamsters’ <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-no-endorsement-for-u-s-president/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">backhanded</a> endorsement of Donald Trump for president has caused an uproar in the US trade union movement. Teamster General President Sean O’Brien, who just a year and a half ago was being touted as a new militant leader of the union, hosted at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAkjSm3m3FA" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Labor Notes</a> conferences, <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/2022-08-21/bernie-sanders-joins-cambridge-rally-for-workers-rights-highlighting-massachusetts-union-battles" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">toured</a> the country with Bernie Sanders and Sarah Nelson, and received enthusiastic coverage in the left media, is now considered toxic.
His open courting of the far right began last autumn, followed by a private meeting with Trump, donations to the Republican National Committee (RNC), his speech at the Republican convention all culminated in the vote by a majority of the union’s General Executive Board (GEB) <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-no-endorsement-for-u-s-president/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">not to endorse</a> any candidate for president, while releasing dubious <a href="https://teamster.org/2024/09/teamsters-release-presidential-endorsement-polling-data/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">polling</a> that the majority of Teamsters supported Trump. This was a shock to many <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/09/teamsters-union-sean-obrien-harris-trump.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">observers</a> of the US labour movement, but this side of O’Brien has been hiding in <a href="https://newpol.org/where-are-the-teamsters-going/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plain sight</a> for a long time.
The polls for the presidential election are either balanced on a knife’s edge or show a Trump lead, especially in the <a href="https://nypost.com/2024/10/02/us-news/donald-trump-shows-strength-in-upper-midwest-which-kamala-harris-needs-to-win/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">upper Midwest</a>. Teamster votes could make the difference in the outcome of the race. So, it’s understandable that anger and bewilderment at O’Brien and the Teamsters is widespread. A <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/08/letter-open-rebellion-against-teamsters-gp-sean-obrien/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">backlash</a> against O’Brien’s embrace of the far right has been building, however. <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4826837-national-black-caucus-teamsters-endorsement-kamala-harris/">The Teamsters National Black Caucus</a> first broke ranks, along with Teamster Vice-President at-large <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/video/teamsters-union-vicepresident-harris-endorsement-john-palmer-trump-musk-ebof-digvid" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">John Palmer</a>, and endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket.
At the same time, in a confusing political summersault, those members of the Teamsters’ GEB who <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=512018861785335&amp;set=a.273224618998095" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">voted not to endorse</a> any candidate nor to go record against Trump, or who skipped the meeting entirely, returned to their <a href="https://www.teamsterslocal705.net/teamsters-local-705-endorses-kamala-harris-for-president" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">local unions</a> and Joint Councils and quickly issued statements—representing as many <a href="https://www.wispolitics.com/2024/harris-campaign-councils-representing-one-million-teamsters-endorse-kamala-harris/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1 million</a> out of total Teamster membership of 1.3 million—that endorsed Harris and Walz. Even members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the former reform organisation, which is now comfortably part of the leadership of the Teamsters, have played a central role in launching <a href="https://act.teamstersagainsttrump.org/pledge?utm_source=20240830-google_nat-80&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjwx4O4BhAnEiwA42SbVIDnqLCJGI5YIe6LHfUtXZbMPj3wcm543CPpypB1X65z8SoP5xbITRoCC5MQAvD_BwE" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamsters against Trump</a> to mobilise Teamster votes for the Democrats.
It appears that a majority of the Teamsters GEB and the leadership of TDU, though, are desperately trying to avoid a clash with the white nationalist sympathiser leading their union, who they have invested heavily in for several years now. For many trade unionists, Trump represents an existential threat to trade unions and broader democratic rights in this country. Yet he also receives significant support among union and non-union workers across, despite his <a href="https://aflcio.org/press/releases/donald-trumps-catastrophic-and-devastating-anti-labor-track-record" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">long anti-union record</a> and <a href="https://usa-works.org/prevailing-wage/afl-cio-exposes-anti-worker-policies-in-trumps-second-term-the-afl-cio-has-raised-alarms-about-the-anti-worker-policies-embedded-in-former-president-donald-trumps-proposed-second-te/?gad_source=1&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjw6oi4BhD1ARIsAL6pox1vou6WXWjrESWwRg2CRFZp_c_Bzt3M2dNb_1OQteinvmy0sUZt1vEaAg0bEALw_wcB" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">plans</a> to dismantle many of the legal rights of trade unions.
Can partisan Democrats on the Teamsters’ Joint Councils across the country and Teamsters against Trump beat the MAGA vote in the union? If it can or can’t, what does that say about the state of rank-and-file politics in the Teamsters, and what comes after?
Joint Councils to the rescue?
John Nichols of the Nation magazine enthused about the Teamsters’ Joint Councils’ endorsement of Harris across the country, which appeared to have check-mated the Teamster leadership’s non-endorsement. He enthused:
“The Harris campaign may not have won over the national leadership of the Teamsters in Washington, it has ended up with something more important: a bonanza of endorsements from Teamsters units in the battleground states that will decide the presidential race.
“In fact, Harris received so many endorsements from Teamsters joint councils and union locals in states across the country that her campaign is now touting endorsements of the Democrat from units representing more than 1 million of the labor organization’s 1.3 million members. And they’ve gotten a boost from James P. Hoffa, who led the union for decades as its general president. Hoffa ripped into the current leadership, calling the failure to back the Democratic ticket this year ‘a critical error and, frankly, a failure of leadership by O’Brien’.”
Reading Nichols, I was struck by several things about his take on developments in the Teamsters. I find his embrace of the former general president of the union James P. Hoffa, Jr. bewildering. Nichols ignores Hoffa’s two-decade-long, disastrous leadership of the Teamsters, including endorsing every Democratic Party presidential candidate from Al Gore in 2000 to Joe Biden in 2020. While O’Brien was the first Teamster leader to address the RNC, Hoffa was lavishly courted by the GOP in 2000. According to the <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/2000/08/01/party-gives-hoffa-the-podium-to-play-field/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Chicago Tribune</a>:
“For the first time in 20 years, the Republican National Committee threw a bash for a Teamsters chief. The glad-handing assembled included Republican senators like Michigan’s Spencer Abraham and Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum, who face tough re-election races in union-heavy states, and old-guard stalwarts like Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Ted Stevens (Alaska).
“Hoffa, a delegate to this month’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles, obviously was thrilled. ‘I didn’t know I had so many Republican friends,’ he said.”
One of those Republican friends was fascist sympathiser <a href="https://fbaum.unc.edu/lobby/040_PNTR/Organizational_Statements/Teamsters/Hoffa_Leads.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Pat Buchanan</a>, whom Hoffa leaned on to ramp up anti-Chinese xenophobia. Hoffa was close to Trump during his one term in office. In late 2019, I <a href="https://newpol.org/where-are-the-teamsters-going/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>:
“Despite having endorsed Hilary Clinton in 2016, Hoffa who earned a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/01/27/hoffa-pledge-to-work-with-trump-where-it-helps-organized-labor.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reputation</a> as one of President Donald Trump’s most reliable union supporters on trade and infrastructure projects, including the environmentally disastrous <a href="https://teamster.org/news/2017/01/teamsters-applaud-executive-orders-advancing-pipeline-projects" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Keystone</a> XL and Dakota Access Pipelines and the ongoing <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-teamsters-president-supports-trumps-new-tariffs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">trade war</a> with China.
“Hoffa admitted in an October <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teamsters-union-james-hoffa-trump-promises_n_5dbb26ace4b00d83f724e5a3?guccounter=1&amp;guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADFfEoKh5m0A0DLPBS0Dtd0Jy2JZYRFBl8NNUrwV6dBtsHrx6AKu5bLiRoxdTMxsMDl5pe3uF8qbY_UZIwlZQPa_Wcs4rLIW4-zIItrrAIxFy9Wdr5evQoJ8Nty-8msHRx4JUAxcwMabY9UtEBmB9Wn0FZkp-enfRQT_9_rzj1GW" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">interview</a> that many Teamsters voted for Trump in 2016. Hoffa also predicted that many ‘Teamsters are likely to vote for Trump again in 2020, regardless of who the Democratic nominee turns out to be’.”
Hoping that Hoffa can push back the MAGA vote is an act of political folly. “But, pretty much the same can be said about the Joint Councils across the country, also.” Joint Councils are important administrative bodies in the Teamsters but are obscure at best to the broad membership. They have also been derided for decades by union reformers as undemocratic, stuffed with patronage employees, and an easy way for local union principal officers to gain another paycheck for little work. Earlier this year, I <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/18/chicago-teamsters-are-still-stuck-in-the-past/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reviewed</a> the role of Chicago’s Joint Council 25 in local elections:
“Despite some changes, the JC 25 remains pretty wedded to the old ways of doing things in their own unions and in city and county politics. For example, last year the largely immigrant, non-English speaking members of Tom Stiede’s Local had to overcome the retaliatory behavior of their employer, the Anthony Marano Company, a major produce distributor in the Chicago area, and the hostility of their union over wage and working conditions documented by Labor Notes’ Luis Feliz Leon, <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/03/chicago-grocery-teamsters-face-firing-and-retaliation-exercising-their-rights" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">here</a>. With this kind of record, how is someone elected to a leadership position in the Chicago Teamsters?”
In August, West Coast Teamster and UPS driver Edgar Esquivel took a <a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/08/letter-after-sean-obriens-spectacle-at-the-rnc-teamsters-withdraw-premature-endorsement-of-racist-kevin-de-leon/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">deep dive</a> into the backstabbing, racist world of Los Angeles area Joint Council 42:
“In the aftermath of Sean O’Brien’s embarrassing homage to the most <a href="https://oaklandsocialist.com/2024/07/17/republican-convention-teamster-reform-leader-channels-gregor-strasser-and-betrays-the-working-class/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reactionary</a> and xenophobic Republican party in generations at their party’s National Convention last month, the largest Teamsters joint council (JC) in the union, JC 42, had prematurely voted in mid-July to endorse the reelection of Democratic party xenophobe Kevin de Leon for Los Angeles city council’s 14th district—only to withdraw it two weeks later. The city councilman gained national notoriety when he compared a colleague’s adopted black son to <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/20/kevin-de-leon-reelection-la-00116827" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">luxury handbags</a> almost two years ago. De Leon’s remarks triggered protests in the second largest city in the US and calls for his resignation.”
Chicago’s Joint Council 25 and Los Angeles’ Joint Council 42 are two of the largest in the Teamsters. How anyone can think that these people can fight the MAGA vote is beyond me. But, it does reveal, I think, that many of the professional, middle-class liberal and social democratic observers of the Teamsters actually know very little about how the union operates and interacts with its members.
Teamsters against Trump
Teamsters against Trump <a href="https://act.teamstersagainsttrump.org/pledge?utm_source=20240830-google_nat-80&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjw6oi4BhD1ARIsAL6pox241j4D9tlhK9AWxYe8y1pXCiJe6ftxUI2L0KUKz5eosq6qCGM3aJ8aArYEEALw_wcB" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">(TAT)</a> is different from the Joint Councils that have endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket, if only by a few degrees. It’s a pretty bare-bones operation initiated by members of TDU and held its first online meeting for volunteers on 28 September. It also leans heavily on a few staff members of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, Kentucky, the home local of Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman. Zuckerman ran with O’Brien on the same Teamsters United slate that won a landslide election in 2021.
Listening in on the discussion, it struck me that TAT acts largely as a campaign vehicle for marshalling votes for the Harris-Walz ticket. It made no demands on the Teamsters union or the Harris-Walz slate, and this was largely reflected in the discussion, which emphasised getting our side out to vote in key battleground states and, most importantly, not to engage Trump supporters in the union. So far, it has put out one <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7IGFErp5Es" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">video</a>. With only a few weeks to go in the election, this may strike people as very practical, but it is also short-sighted. Far-right politics, particularly around anti-China and anti-Mexican xenophobia, has been stoked for decades in the Teamsters. It’s hard to see how one defeats the MAGA vote without taking it on.
The other major problem for TAT is that it has to carry the burdens of the Biden-Harris administration. The American Rescue Plan saved <a href="https://act.teamstersagainsttrump.org/pledge?utm_source=20240830-google_nat-80&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjw6oi4BhD1ARIsAL6pox241j4D9tlhK9AWxYe8y1pXCiJe6ftxUI2L0KUKz5eosq6qCGM3aJ8aArYEEALw_wcB" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamster pensions</a> across the country, which didn’t get one Republican vote, and is reason alone that many Teamsters in the upper Midwest will vote for the Harris-Walz ticket. (Their broader appeal on this issue could be undermined by a recent report that Governor Tim Walz <a href="https://pensionwarriorsdwardsiedle.substack.com/p/ny-post-minnesota-teacher-pension?utm_source=post-email-title&amp;publication_id=1498647&amp;post_id=149859330&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=nn3z2&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">cooked the books</a> on the Minnesota state teachers’ pension.) Trade unions, however, only represent 10 percent of the US workforce and a minuscule 6 percent of the private sector. Issues like labour law, important to unions, don’t necessarily resonate with the broader working class, whose lives are very precarious, from housing to food costs.
A recent article in the <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/inq2/philadelphia-working-class-voters-republican-20241001.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawFvuk5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRXI9w4P5itkfD_UvCY6zX7c9t9CjiUWoGB16QJoRkSuUvWcJx8UxIJahA_aem_XdAJQRIaBEJJRuReIjR-Jw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Philadelphia Inquirer</a> captured this well:
“Jim Kohn voted for Democrats much of life — that is, until Trump came along in 2016. Kohn, a retired truck driver who lives in South Philly and for years voted along with the Teamsters union, is still a registered Democrat. But he’s planning to vote for Trump for the third time, and he believes more of his neighbors frustrated with inflation and the high cost of goods will, too. ‘When Trump was president, everything was cheaper,’ he said. ‘Now, everything is so sky high.’”
Another Philadelphia resident told the Inquirer:
“They’re saying Kamala is going to save our democracy. That means very little for people who can’t keep the lights on.”
TAT also has to carry the burdens of Teamsters and TDU into the election. One of the battlegrounds that they are planning on intervening in is Michigan, with its large Arab and Muslim population. The Teamsters are one of the few major unions to have not called for a ceasefire in Gaza. This will work against their credibility, but TDU also<a href="https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/12/a-tale-of-two-resolutions-why-is-tdu-so-hostile-to-anti-war-activism/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> tabled</a> a motion for a ceasefire at its last convention. That the wider war initiated by Israel in the Middle East is tied so intimately with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies will be a huge barrier in their campaigning. With less than a month to go in the presidential election, anti-Trump Teamster campaigners being so closely tied to the Democratic party may, once again, prove to be a false road taken.
First published at <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/07/can-teamsters-against-trump-beat-the-maga-vote/">CounterPunch</a>.

Joe Allen

Can Teamsters unionists in the US beat the Trump vote?

If you’d asked Victorians what they were most looking forward to in 2024, local council elections probably wouldn’t have made even the top 20. Many people probably only ever interact with their local council to dispute a parking fine or to order a new wheelie bin—hence the cliché that local government is about three Rs: rates, roads and rubbish. While road maintenance and garbage collection are vital, they’re not likely to be the subject of the next gripping political drama. 
That being said, there’s no shortage of corruption and intrigue in local government, which is one reason the major parties often prefer to run in something approaching “incognito mode” in council elections. Scandals, dodgy dealings and “governance issues” (the official euphemism) are <a href="https://www.governmentnews.com.au/another-week-another-monitor-sent-to-a-victorian-council/">commonplace</a>.
It’s no wonder, then, that most people expect little from their local council and get about as much. But that’s exactly what, in their own small way, Victorian Socialists (VS) have set out to change at council elections taking place in Victoria via postal ballot in October. 
VS want to inject another ‘R’ into the local councils: radical politics. Across the state, some <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/council">80 Victorian Socialists candidates</a> will be running on an unashamedly radical platform that highlights just what councils could and should be doing for working people. 
That includes <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jorge_andres_jorquera/">Jorge Jorquera</a>, Victorian Socialists’ first and only elected representative, who will be running for re-election to the Maribyrnong Council in Melbourne’s inner west. “People think councils just deal with small problems”, Jorquera told Red Flag, “but the simple reality is that behind every one of those small problems is a bigger problem. Whether it’s fixing a pothole or putting in a new sports field, there’s always a bigger problem, and it’s usually spelled with a ‘c’—it’s capitalism”.
Take the cost-of-living crisis, for example. In the latest <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-au/issuesmonitor">Ipsos Issues Monitor poll</a>, which surveys Australians on what they see as the main “issues facing the nation”, rising costs ranked as the number one concern by far. Number two on the list was housing, and number three was the economy. In other words, it’s cost of living first, second and third.
“The cost of living and access to affordable housing are the issues that come up over and over”, Darebin Council candidate Cat Rose told Red Flag, “and all levels of government, including local councils, are responsible for walking away from this generational crisis”.
There are plenty of things councils could be doing. They could start with council rates. Victorian Socialists are calling for rate relief for low-income households—a simple measure that could make a real difference. By doing this, councils could also set an example and put pressure on state and federal governments to act in other ways.
Then there’s the rising unaffordability of housing, which is at its <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/sep/21/housing-affordability-proptrack-report-first-home-buyers-renters-mortgage-holders">worst since records began in 1995.</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/17/victorias-social-housing-stock-grows-by-just-74-dwellings-in-four-years-despite-huge-waiting-list">Tens of thousands</a> of people have joined Victoria’s social housing waiting list over recent years. To add insult to injury, it was recently revealed in a <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/">report by Prosper Australia</a> that across Melbourne around 100,000 homes sat empty or underused in 2023.
It’s little wonder when the major parties have for decades pushed neoliberal policies that have turned housing more and more into an investment asset for the rich rather than something that meets the fundamental human need for shelter. Property investors are forecast, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/01/negative-gearing-and-capital-gains-tax-discounts-to-cost-australian-budget-165bn-over-10-years-analysis-reveals">an analysis</a> undertaken by the Parliamentary Budget Office at the request of the Greens, to receive $165 billion in tax breaks over the next ten years. Meanwhile, public housing residents <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/beach-views-not-just-rich">are being evicted</a> from their homes as governments dismantle what’s left of Australia’s diminishing stock. In Victoria, social housing now represents only 2.9 percent of all housing stock, the lowest proportion of any state. 
Councils should be fighting, with all the means at their disposal, to change this appalling situation. 
One way they could do that is by making use of their powers to approve or reject proposals for new developments in their area. “We’ve got to use those powers now while we’ve got them”, Jorquera says. He’s referring to the fact that the state government recently moved to <a href="https://www.governmentnews.com.au/victorian-planning-reforms-take-power-away-from-councils/">strip back</a> council planning powers and give a freer hand to property developers, who never miss an opportunity to complain about council “red tape”.
Victorian Socialists say councils need to fight to keep those powers and use them to push for developments that put people before profit by, for example, imposing 30 percent public and community housing inclusions on large private developments. Measures like that could start to address the dire and growing need for affordable housing and put downward pressure on the cost of housing in general. 
VS candidate for Merri-bek City Council Louisa Bassini, a community lawyer and renters’ rights advocate, says these kinds of policies are popular with voters she’s spoken to. “No-one seems to think that it’s fair”, she explains, “that such huge profits are being made out of housing when people are struggling to afford it, and public amenities are inadequate”.
Councils themselves have been run down by decades of neoliberalism. “Potholes are a good example”, says Jorquera. “One of the reasons they don’t get fixed in due time is that councils are paying millions of dollars on things like that because of outsourcing and privatisation. Here in Maribyrnong, it has cost millions of dollars to put in 200 metres of a bike lane, because it’s all outsourced.” One of Victorian Socialists’ core policies is to oppose any further privatisation of council services and assets.
Even where councils’ direct powers are limited, there’s nothing to stop them from putting their resources into helping put some power back into the hands of ordinary people. 
For example, Jorquera wants councils to establish an information service for renters. “In the average local government area”, he says, “40 percent of people are renting. But with councils based on ratepayers [i.e. property owners] renters are basically not part of the equation. Every council should have a rental information service that protects the rights of renters. No council, as far as I know, has one of those”.
As for bigger political questions, Victorian Socialists candidates don’t have much time for the idea that councils should just stick to “roads, rates and rubbish”. And they have a solid record as long-term community activists. “People are paying attention to what’s happening in the world, and they expect local councils to as well”, says Bassini. In February this year, she organised <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/community-workers-walk-out-palestine">an illegal walkout</a> for Palestine at her workplace—one of the only examples of industrial action by workers for Palestine since the solidarity movement erupted last October.
Jorquera has been putting socialist principles into practice at a local council level since his election in 2020. Thanks to him, the Maribyrnong City Council became the first council in Victoria to join the national #racismNOTwelcome campaign, which put up anti-racist street signs across the council area. He has also initiated discussion in the council about recognising 26 January as a day of mourning, not one of celebration. 
Jorquera’s efforts meant that his council became one of the first to fly the Palestinian flag in protest at Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That set the ball rolling on campaigns in local councils across Melbourne for solidarity with Palestine, campaigns that members of Victorian Socialists played <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/councils-battle-over-palestine">a significant role in</a>.
And we should remember that it’s not just our side that’s getting organised. In America, the far right have been very active in local politics, agitating on school boards and city councils to push their reactionary agenda. In Australia, right-wing bigots have taken note. Last year, far-right groups protested against drag queen story-time events organised by local councils across Melbourne. Shamefully, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/councils-cancel-lgbt-events-are-helping-fascists-win-it-has-stop">several councils caved to the pressure</a> and handed the bigots a win. This year, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/fringe-groups-have-been-causing-council-chaos-now-they-plan-to-get-elected-20240104-p5ev7u.html">it was reported,</a> far-right groups aligned with the reactionary My Place movement, are making a push in the local government elections. Even on local councils, we need people prepared to stand against all forms of bigotry and take the far-right threat seriously.
The council election campaign is part of Victorian Socialists’ larger project of trying to rebuild socialist politics into, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-you-should-campaign-victorian-socialists-election">in the words of VS member Jerome Small</a>, “a living, breathing, organising, controversialising political force in this country’s political life”. That means a totally different approach to politics at every level—one that’s about putting power back into the hands of ordinary people and building their confidence to fight and demand more from a system that offers them less and less. 
In the Hume council area in Melbourne’s outer north, where IT worker Mutullah “Mutu” Can Yolbulan is a VS candidate, the campaign is already yielding results. “We’ve already received a commitment from the council [to build] a one-hectare park on Broadmeadows Reserve, and we will make sure that park gets built”, Mutu says. “If we were able to achieve this now, imagine how we could improve the rest of our city in a four-year term and improve the day-to-day lives of working-class people.”
The 2024 council elections will be the first since legislation introduced by disgraced former Labor Party local government minister and veteran branch-stacker Adem Somyurek abolished multi-member wards in all but one Melbourne council and many regional ones. That means councils are now divided up into smaller wards with one elected member each. Labor is worried about losing ground on councils, and this was a transparent attempt to elbow out smaller parties, which benefit from more proportional representation systems. 
That will make things harder for a small party like Victorian Socialists, but its candidates and campaigners remain hopeful that, when all the votes are counted, a new face or two will have been added to the current small crop of socialist local councillors in Melbourne. Even short of that though, the party’s council campaign has further established its credentials as a socialist electoral alternative in Victoria, at the same time as many of its members have continued to play a central role in the Palestine solidarity movement and other areas of grassroots organising and activism. This is a solid platform to build on in the months and years ahead.

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